Chris Johanson Opening

We still feel new enough to the bay area that when we hear or read of something cool happening in San Francisco we think to ourselves,"if we were closer...." Well, it turns out, we are close. Close enough that if we didn't go to the said thing we really, really wanted to see or hear because we had to work in the morning or were just plain lazy, we would be those old people we swear we aren't becoming. So, upon finding out there would be a Chris Johanson opening downtown at the Jack Hanley Gallery( a mere hour and a half drive from door to door if the traffic's with you), we shook our sugar trees and made it happen. The art world was our oyster as I made a semi aggressive move onto a downtown street like any other urban trafficker enacts multiple times daily. Wrong! Johny Traffic Copper was there to make me pay for such an obviously violent act while the rest of the city waited calmly and obediently for lights to change, paychecks to come in, and class disparity to be resolved. So, ticket in hand, we rolled into a very hip happening. The crowd spilling out onto the sidewalk looked several years younger and a few degrees cooler than these two country bumpkins. Once inside, the smell of fresh interior wall paint and street sweat hit the olfactories hard enough to cause a shared glance amongst ourselves. Chris's work was hung up in the most intentionally frustrating way I've ever seen an art show hung. In what amounted to an elaborate but roughly hewn cattle loading shoot, the paintings and drawings were put up too close to get back from and-in the jammin' situation-there was little room to linger or turn back and you can forget about an untied shoelace. In certain places 2x4s ran their length at chest level and one had to duck under the drawings attached to these pieces of poorly painted wood and pop up on the other side to see a couple of drawings one had no hope of seeing very well. Johanson comes from the Beautiful Losers school which spawned Barry Mcgee and Margaret Kilgallen, so in this scene our man is a star. a celebrity. a VIP. a somebody. His work is that of an outsider's insider and full of dead on existentialism gleaned from skating and living amongst the daily grind of poverty and anonymity that used to define the urban art experience. It's as though he took all the mad ramblings of dudes you sit next to on the bus or avoid eye contact with on the street and whittled it all down to the bone. the funny bone. Then put it on paper in the simplest, most naive, most irreverent, most truthful manner. All of which is fine until you start selling wrinkled pieces of paper sack with five minute paintings on them for seven thouand dollars. Then and only then do I get confused about what matters and what's authentic and what's exploitation. Mostly, though, it made us consider the fragile equation of where you live affecting how you make your art about who or what you make your art for who comes to see your art and why both you or they bother with any of it... then, we walked down the block to Mi Lindo Yucatan and comforted our questions with brazos de reina and salbutes and negra modelos. We toasted to our bafflement with the art establishment and some soon to come clarity. this hole in the wall was so cool, the waitress didn't even let those high heeled, soy latte drinkin', couture wearin' marin county art groupie broads who are so used to getting their way in to pee in their bathroom. we drank to that, too.